


Dustbowl Downpour

by bansheesquad (deathwailart)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Androids, F/F, Lady scientists, Post-Apocalypse, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 17:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15296682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/bansheesquad
Summary: Rain is welcome in the dustbowl until it isn't.Or: torrential downpours aren't as much fun for an android and it'd be good if the human understood that.





	Dustbowl Downpour

**Author's Note:**

> Features the same ladies from [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6136147) story which it references a couple of times. Not required reading, I think you'll still understand them and everything that's going on from this.

Rain is welcome in the dustbowl until it isn't.   
  
They need water, and the pains they go to checking the radiation, the salinity, the bacteria and microbes, the heavy metals in it some places, any number of things might they do now while they collect it (and collect it is a whole other thing, the setting up for the rainwater in addition to whatever they might be lucky enough to pump up from below, get from a river or lake if those can be found) might once have been described as obsessive even if clean water should always have been a right and something to be taken care of. Alana had told horror stories to Antonia until she'd clapped a hand over her faceplate as if that'd stop her the way it would a person.  
  
Alana had stopped. People didn't like all the reminders of  _before_. About what was taken for granted.  
  
So rain is welcome in the dustbowl until it isn't, because if the water runs out then a place and a people are well and truly  _done_ , seven days without water and they won't last (a litre, they lose a litre a day, Antonia says it's probably more now too with the heat around them, with the food they eat, the conditions that aren't what they should be.) If the water goes they have to go. Take what they can and find a new place with water to start again or a settlement where they might be allowed in.   
  
Both she and Antonia have met people who've come to their settlement in this way, sat in the chill of Antonia's lab as she checks them over because she's the only one here who can do that sort of thing (there's meant to be a doctor but there's  _always_  meant to be a doctor, and Alana is learning, is making space in herself for it, to help, to see that Antonia  _rests_  for once.) Alana has more stories than Antonia. Alana was here longer after all, but she doesn't—  
  
Well she asks. She asks sometimes then doesn't.   
  
("You—You can…if—if you n-need to?"  
  
"See, your voice is glitching out. Earlier, when I asked and you told me," Antonia swallows in the memory which is sharp and bright as broken test tubes beneath the improvised lab lights as all things are with Antonia, "I saw your visor input turn blank."  
  
"I didn't notice." Embarrassment is a strange thing to process. Even after. Even as a memory.  
  
"And when I  _did_  ask, your voice was flat. No glitching. I think maybe you did something to section parts of yourself off and I don't want you to have to do that because  _I_  asked something I can find out for myself, I could hear the whirring, and your hands—" Antonia holds them in the memory…)  
  
Alana cups empty air as if Antonia's hands are still in hers, draws herself out and back. The endless drumbeat of rain on corrugated steel, plastic sheeting, wood that'll go to rot because there's nothing to treat it with to prevent it. Rain is welcome until it isn't, until the sound of it is driving her to distraction, the tinny staccato plink-plink-plink discordant and shrill somehow against the incessant drone, though that somehow isn't the worst of it. (Alana could, after all, adjust her auditory input. If she wanted to. But there's so much she  _likes_  to hear that she puts up with this cacophony.   
  
Most of the time. Some of Antonia's music choices in the lab, those she turns all the way down.)  
  
The dustbowl is baked red earth with a fine layer on top with few trees or grasses or shrubs to hold it in place. Any rain is quick to turn the dust everyone complains about but sweeps easily from under their doors into a sea of mud that gets everywhere. It rushes beneath doorways faster than they can stem the tide. It cakes. It leaves smears the colour of old blood everywhere it dries. No one is dressed for it either. Loose light layers to shield from the sun with some leathers or overalls that take too long to dry out when hung indoors to leave rust pools beneath them.   
  
Antonia is peering out from the safety of the lab doorway, shivering though not as cold as others might be given how cool the lab is with metal storage containers that don't trap any heat within them, her curls turned to frizz in the damp, splatters of dirt decorating the front of her jeans from the sheer force of the downpour. Since it started she's been working non-stop to collect as much water as possible before any containers overflow so as not to lose a single valuable drop if it can be helped with as much other work as can be spared being put to the side to assist, all of it ready to be sorted, treated, assessed, though of course people have their own private reserves to do with as they see fit. Outside of work talk, Alana's barely spoken to her in days. Alana's barely seen her up close in days. Not since the downpour officially went form 'well this is certainly more than we're used to and a trifle of an inconvenience' to 'there's a very good chance we might drown and be swept away'. Alana has, instead, chosen to stay in their rooms to tend to their personal stash.  
  
She is not, in Antonia's words, sulking.  
  
She most certainly isn't  _hiding_  either.   
  
Which Antonia would know if she did more than peel off her damp mud-stained clothes every night, ineffectually drag a brush through her hair, towel off, throw on some excuse for pyjamas, and collapse into bed with a half-hearted pat at where she thought Alana was most likely to.  
  
From the window, Alana peers outside, parting the faded curtains to watch other settlers racing across the spider web of wooden boards set down hastily to connect as many buildings as possible according to necessity, spiralling outwards in some sort of pattern she might be able to make out from on high. Not from here. Staring. Remembering  _before_  the boards. Running home with Antonia, the mud sucking at her feet with her heavier body lacking the grip of Antonia's boots as she'd lost her balance, footing gone, knowing that a flurry of red and yellow exclamation marks would have been flashing all over her visor before rearranging into a frown once her voice stopped glitching when she hit the ground (cold, wet, sucking, still oddly gritty) and realised that Antonia was  _laughing_.  
  
And yes, Antonia had helped her up. Antonia had shivered inside their little home as she'd cleaned all the muck out then checked her for damage, helped with running diagnostics, she'd laughed. Come around to sit dripping and wet with her wild frizzing curls and deemed her a big baby.  
  
It hurts, Alana knows it hurts, but Antonia is all the way in the lab and Alana is  _not_  going back outside because the ribbing will be so much worse now, so she's stuck in here as her processors whirr, as her hands clench into fists—  
  
The door bangs open. She jumps away from the window. Antonia—  
  
"Stop shaking the way a rabid dog does, there's rot already." Alana complains, voice rising in pitch midway through in annoyance as her vision pulses brightly with the pixels rearranging on her visor.  
  
Antonia frowns, blows out an exaggerated sigh and stomp-stomp-stomps in her big dirty boots tracking big muddy prints all over the floor. "I'm not getting any on you." There's an undercurrent in her muttering, jacket tossed in the direction of the chair where it lands with a wet slap to the floor that she makes no effort to deal with.   
  
Alana doesn't need to take a breath the way people do. Instead there's a sub-system that kicks in. A flood of images to induce calm that she routes away because she would very much like to stay angry as she stalks over, snatches the jacket up to drape it over the back of the chair. "What's that supposed to mean?"   
  
Antonia turns – slowly, oh so slowly – at her voice. At what her voice does. Tinny warbling distortion flanging through it. Alana follows the rise and fall of her throat as she swallows. Imagines that she can see the thought process. When she thinks better of sitting on the bed in her dirty clothes. Bending to take off the boots where she stands. Looking about the room for something that might help.  
  
"I mean that I know better and I wouldn't—"  
  
"Wouldn't what?" Alana interrupts. Curls her fingers around the chair back. It creaks even with the layer of buttery leather between her hand and it.   
  
"What's gotten—is this about the other day?" Antonia has a face with eyes, nose, mouth, tissue, muscles, tendons, skin, all these moving parts to convey her feelings on things but she might as well have the same lightbulb that pops up on Alana's visor right now. "Alana," barefoot, she pads over, stepping around the drying muddy prints on the floor with a hand outstretched, hesitant, conciliatory, rueful smile on her face, "look it just—it happened. People falling, it's funny. I don't know why it's funny, it just…it is."  
  
"Not to me." Alana's voice is very small to her own sensors. It almost, well it would wobble maybe if she were had those parts, here it drops in and out, distorted, a radio with bad reception.  
  
Antonia has the grace to blush.  
  
"Alana I'm sorry-"  
  
"There aren't parts for me. You can run diagnostics, patch me up, but you can't  _fix_  me Antonia! If the rain gets in or the mud or both, if they get into my parts or something breaks there aren't replacements, and I know, I  _know_  that you're good, that you are the very best people have," Alana doesn't need to breathe, approximates the pauses for the comfort of others, as a consequence of being built by humans for humans.  
  
( _My function was to catalogue. I was to observe, to watch. I—I—_  one of the first  _admissions_  to Antonia.  
  
Or was it a confession. Humans had a blurred line about those things but it wasn’t as if they had preachers often, finding faith or god or the shape of it was your own choice to make now.)  
  
Antonia is holding her hands and her eyes are wet, tugging Alana closer which only happens because Alana allows it. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have, I forget sometimes, you're alive, and you're—I forget. And I don't want to-"  
  
"I know. I don't want to tell you." Too much to do, never the time or the money or the parts. Skills that can never be learnt even if there were a hundred lifetimes to do it because there are gaps in the shape of the dead to be filled. "I always think it could be you. You're fragile. But so many things you go to pick through when we leave for trips or the workers find? It was planned. People planned for that. Planned to make them go obsolete."  
  
Antonia shudders in a way that is nothing to do with being cold and damp and pressed against cool metal, and Alana allows herself that too, behaviours picked up. Habits. Lets go of one hand to have Antonia's wrap tight about her middle (up on her toes, flex of tendons, head on the shoulder) with hers in hair she tries to tame until it catches in tangles in the joints of her fingers that she has to pull free carefully, watching curls spring back. The rain still beats down when she drops her voice output to what would be a whisper, says they should go to bed, and she undresses Antonia (hangs  _up_  the clothes but the boots are a lost cause, the laces will be a casualty of the weather she observes on the trip back to bed from the wardrobe) and stretches out alongside her naked in their bed. On their sides. Her fingers around a hip to anchor her there as eyelashes flutter trying to fight sleep as one of Antonia's sleep clumsy hands maps her spine, finds the exposed points that don't have her reduced to binary but drifting.  
  
The rain is easier to sleep through without considering dropping her auditory sensors this way.  
  
Antonia falls asleep, mouth slack, and in the morning she's gone first with the muddy boots gone and the jacket gone, and Alana busies herself with people coming to the door for things they need that they don't want to bother Antonia with but she said it'd be fine. And sure enough Alana takes what they have, settles by the worktable as they talk-talk-talk away the whole time, her hands moving or assessing the problem to their satisfaction before they go charging back into the rain. She repeats for the next day too, and finds herself glad for something to busy herself with.  
  
Antonia returns midway through this second day where the humidity has her sweating even with the downpour, something held behind her back.  
  
"Present! Can you-" She holds her other hand in front of her eyes, and Alana takes the microsecond to consider before her visual sensors drop off. Both hands outstretched. Rituals that survived despite it all, these charming things that render them so very human, that make her happy to be here with them now and to have always been here, hopeful that it will get better, it will continue to—"Ta da!"  
  
Alana's visual input flicks back on to find something made of multiple slick fabrics, a long handle that curves in a U-shape, thin metal under it. Rolled up but tapering to a point—"An umbrella!" In the data banks like so many things but the scientists who made her drew from what they knew, and no one has ever required one in all the time Alana has been walking the dustbowl.  
  
"I had to guess? I did some reading and traded some stuff; I hope you don't mind that I tested it to make sure it didn't leak?"  
  
"It's perfect?" It's astonishingly ugly with the mix-and-match fabrics with colours and patterns clashing, the handle coming from something else and not the elegant thing her memory provides. "Can we go out? I want to try it."  
  
"I need to go to the lab, we can walk there, I can walk you back if-"  
  
"I'll stay. And you can walk me back after."  
  
Antonia beams, closing the door behind them both as she helps with the little catch to get the umbrella open and up, arms linked as they take their time getting back to work. The rain beats down atop the umbrella, the mud sticks to her feet but she's dry, she's dry and Antonia is warm next to her, and this is by far the kindest gift she's been given yet.  
  
Rain is welcome in the dustbowl until it isn't, the way it has all of them pulling tight at the seams always is.


End file.
